Occipital Acquires Paracosm

Over the past few years, we've been building a cutting-edge SLAM platform, which now powers uses from mixed reality to Robotics to the Augmented Home. But one area we have not yet touched with this platform is creating 3D maps of large-scale spaces.

Paracosm's original approach to 3D mapping was very similar to ours, in that they used mobile devices and even our own Structure Sensor; more recently, however, Paracosm has switched to using LiDAR for mapping environments up to the scale of entire city blocks.

LiDAR is a large-scale sensing technology which doesn't have the typical precision-versus-range falloff that can affect stereo or structured light systems. With the new PX-80, Paracosm has fused LiDAR sensing with visible camera tracking using SLAM tuned for large-scale mapping. With the advent of self-driving cars, LiDAR production will rise and costs will drop. That leads us to a future where every single contractor and on-site worker can cost-effectively use one of our devices to track work progress over time.

With the acquisition of Paracosm, we can now apply our SLAM platform to anything from a single-camera smartphone to sophisticated LiDAR-based systems like PX-80.

The entire Paracosm team has joined Occipital, and all Paracosm technologies are now a part of Occipital. We've already begun to discover ways to join our technologies together; for instance, the PX-80's large scale point clouds are already being sent through our Canvas Scan-to-CAD pipeline.

We're excited to welcome Paracosm's team of Parakeets to the Occipital family. Expect great things - some on the scale of entire city blocks - to come from this partnership in the years to come.